The Streets That Stay With You

Some calls linger in the background long after the sirens fade, resurfacing years later in everyday moments

Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s on a steady diet of dad’s beer froth and second-hand smoke, I figured I was pretty much bulletproof. Scuffed knees, no helmets and the occasional wooden spoon. Feelings were something you swallowed and got on with it.

That attitude walked me through recruits and into station life. Kept me there for 17 years. Probably kept me from dealing with a lot of stuff I should’ve dealt with a lot earlier.

Here’s the thing nobody really tells you about the job: it’s not usually the big calls that get you. The big ones arrive loud. Everyone sees it. You debrief, you get space, you probably don’t use it but at least it’s offered. It’s the quiet ones that do the real damage. The jobs that went fine. The ones you handled. The ones you drove home from thinking, yeah, good result, what’s for dinner.

Calls That Don’t Stay Quiet

You bag them up. File them away. Move on. Until one day — years later, completely out of nowhere — the filing cabinet tips over on the highway with your wife and kids in the car.

Blue sky. Open road. Radio on something nobody was really listening to. Normal Friday. Except somewhere along the way my chest did that thing. Grip tightened. I kept my eyes on the road but I wasn’t really there anymore.

That stretch of highway had been a scene. Fatal job. Years back. I’d gone home that morning, cleaned my gear, told my wife it was fine, told myself it was fine, and apparently convinced everyone except the part of my brain that doesn’t give a stuff what I told it.

No dramatic flashbacks. No movie moment. Just a quiet shift — like someone turned the brightness down slightly. The kids were chatting in the back. My wife was pointing something out on the radio. I smiled. Nodded.

That night I was short with the kids for no reason they could see. Edgy. Distracted. From the outside I was just a grumpy dad. From the inside I had no idea why, because I hadn’t connected the dots yet. Didn’t clock that the way I was acting at the dinner table was directly caused by a piece of road an hour away that remembered more than I did.

When the Past Slips Into the Present

That’s how it works. The trigger lands somewhere quiet. The reaction explodes somewhere else entirely. You blame traffic, a bad sleep, the guy at work who’s been getting on your nerves. You’ll find a reason. Your brain is very helpful like that.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn to recognize it. Years of being a difficult person to live with before I started putting it together. For me it’s not a flood of memories, it’s a shift in state. Patience gone. Focus scattered. Chest tight. Breathing slightly harder than the situation calls for. Not dramatic enough to explain to anyone, or even acknowledge myself, which is exactly why it’s so easy to miss.

Every firefighter I know has their version of this. Their streets. Their intersections. The driveway of a particular house in a suburb you’d otherwise never think about. The rest of the world drives past without a second thought. You feel it before you even see it — some smell, a noise, some quality of light — and suddenly you’re carrying something heavy that wasn’t there a minute ago.

I used to think acknowledging that made me weak. Now I think that was just the ’80s talking.

Maintenance, Not Weakness

It’s maintenance. Basic, unglamorous maintenance. You wouldn’t run a truck on bald tires and call yourself tough. You’d change the tires, because you’re not an idiot, and you’d like to get home. The same logic applies here — it just took me 17 years and stepping away from the job to actually apply it.

The body keeps the score as they say, even when the brain thinks you’ve moved on. That incident doesn’t disappear. It sits there, waiting for a stretch of highway or a smell or a particular time of afternoon — and then suddenly it’s dinner time and everyone in your house is walking on eggshells because of a job you went to in 2014.

These days when that shift starts, I try to catch it before it becomes someone else’s problem. Take a breath. Name it, even just to myself — this is one of those roads. Sometimes that’s enough to stop it running the rest of the day. Not always. But more often than not.

Learning to Carry What Stays

There’s nothing soft about that. It’s not self-help nonsense. It’s just the bare minimum of paying attention to how your own brain works — which, if you’re in this job, is doing things regular brains don’t have to do.

The job teaches you to run toward chaos. Nobody teaches you what to do with what’s left after. The bits that stick to you. Which is annoying, but there it is.

The streets stay with you. The houses, the landmarks, the specific exit ramps on specific highways. They belong to a version of you that’s done hard things most people never have to. That’s not a complaint. It’s just the truth.

The goal isn’t to forget them. You won’t. It’s to get to the point where they’re part of the landscape without being in charge of it.

You learn to carry it with a steadier hand because those streets never really let go. And neither do we.

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Originally published in CRACKYL magazine, © 2023 CRACKYL Media Inc. 
Visit CRACKYL for more firefighter health, culture, and performance content: https://crackyl.com

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